Meritocracy screens job applicants for competence — vaccines save our lives rather than poisoning us because highly trained scientists develop them and other highly trained scientists test and regulate them — but, at the same time, it gives everybody a chance to put their names into the sorting hat.

Yet the meritocratic idea is under assault from all directions: from progressives who denounce it as a tool of white male privilege, right-wingers who dismiss it as an instrument of androgynous cosmopolitan elite and uber-meritocrats at Yale and Harvard who regard it as a “trap” and a “tyranny”.

This assault contains a great deal of foolishness. The history of the rise of meritocracy is a history of the opening up of opportunities to marginalised groups and previous attempts to deconstruct it, most notably with Britain’s comprehensive revolution, have only reinforced class-based inequalities. But it also contains a worrying amount of truth: there is clearly something wrong with a system that means that more than 30% of places at Oxbridge go to students who attend private schools that cater for just 7% of the population, and that America’s thirty-eight elite colleges have more students from the top 1% of the population than from the bottom 60%.

The problem with meritocracy, however, is not its traditional accoutrements of open competition and objective tests, but its corruption by money, family connections and favouritism — a corruption that has, subtly but relentlessly, converted meritocracy from a device that was designed to open up opportunity into a way of preserving class privilege.

Suggested reading

Why the elites have no shame

By Mary Harrington

The term meritocracy was coined by Michael Young in 1958 to describe a new ruling class that was defined by IQ and effort rather than, as with the old ruling class, lineage and noblesse oblige. With the market revolution from the 1980s onwards this new ruling class was reshaped by two profound forces: the marriage of merit and money as the successful found clever ways of passing their educational privileges to their children, and the globalisation of the elite as surging flows of goods, information and, above all, money tied the world together.

This involved not just a “reshaping of the meritocratic idea” but a subversion of it. In the mid-19^th century, reformers such as Macaulay and Trevelyan hoped that open competition would remoralise the political elite by replacing greedy aristocrats with diligent public servants. The marriage of money and merit reintroduced self-seeking to the heart of the establishment. The introduction of open competition was counterbalanced by the creation of a ladder of educational opportunity to link the British establishment with the most obscure village. Globalisation rendered the elite even more distant from the rest of society.

The rise of the “pluto-meritocracy” has been driven by two other developments at the top of society: the children of Michael Young’s meritocrats have learnt how to transmit their privileges to the next generation, either by sending their children to private schools or moving to plush suburbs, and the old rich have started to put more emphasis on academic credentials, recognising that Bertie Wooster was a doomed figure in the world of Google Ideas Conferences and business best sellers. The Economist rich are replacing the Tatler rich and people who don’t realise this risk not just social scorn but economic decline.

There is no better example of the merger of merit and money than the transformation of British public schools since 1980. For the three decades after 1945 the public schools looked as if they would become casualties of the rise of the meritocracy as grammar-school boys took the clubbish old establishment by storm.

Today, once mouldering institutions have reinvented themselves as gleaming merit-factories that mix the offspring of the British elite with the children of the new global rich (more than a third of boarders come from abroad despite the fact that the schools enjoy charitable status because they are supposed to educate children for the British church and state.) Public schools not only produce superb academic results — half of all A and A* grades at A-level in the UK are regularly secured by the 7% of students who are privately educated — but are also outstanding at gilding the academic lily with actors, pop stars and sports heroes (an Old Etonian has won a medal in “sitting down sports” in every Olympic Games since 1992.

Suggested reading

How race politics liberated the elites

By Matthew Crawford

Though public-school products no longer glide into Oxford and Cambridge with their previous ease, thanks to intense pressure from the government to diversify their intake, they are increasingly finding a home in the Ivy League instead, which may well end up making them more successful, as well as more divorced from wider British society.

The marriage of money and merit is literal as much as metaphorical: one of the paradoxes of the feminist revolution is that educated men increasingly marry educated women and then collaborate together to make sure that their children are given every cognitive advantage. This is leading to the reinvention of aristocratic institutions such as dynasties and nepotistic connections in new quasi meritocratic forms.

We have seen the creation of meritocratic dynasties such as the Clintons, Cuomos and Romneys and the United States, and the multiplication of meritocratic power couples such as Michelle and Barack Obama in America, Tony and Cheri Blair in Britain and Francoise Hollande and Segolene Royale in France. We have also seen the production of all-elite children: one of the most depressing rituals of my year is to read the annual Record of Balliol College, Oxford, my alma mater, with its self-satisfied litany of “all Balliol” marriages and “all Balliol” babies.

Assortative mating acts as a powerful multiplier of inequality — and one that has much more impact on the overall tenor of society than the existence of a handful of billionaires. The obvious reason for this is that two university graduates will earn very many multiples of two high-school drop-outs: one American academic study found that if people married each other at random, the overall level of inequality would be much as it was in 1960.

The more subtle reason lies in self-segregation and self-cultivation. High IQ couples tend to gather together in a handful of highly educated cities (London, New York, San Francisco, for example) and in handful of rich neighbourhoods within those cities (Islington in London, Manhattan and Brooklyn in New York). The property prices in these cities are now so inflated that middle-class families are forced to move out, leaving an uneasy mixture of digital Brahmins and service-sector Untouchables.

They can also bring huge resources, both personal and financial, to educating their children, providing them with an enriched vocabulary when they are tiny, surrounding them with Baby-Einstein style learning tools, sending them to the best schools available, scheming them to get them into the best universities and then providing them with free board and lodging as they cycle through a succession of higher educational qualifications, internships and low paying “starter jobs”.

Suggested reading

What gardening taught me about London's liberal elite

By Henry Wismayer

For the most ambitious members of the meritocratic elite no longer content themselves with running national institutions. They aspire to run global ones as well, most obviously in the private sector, but also in universities, philanthropies and multilateral institutions. The further people rise up their professional pyramids the more they interact with their peers around the world, forging, in the process, a common global class, selected and promoted by academic qualifications and linked by an ever thicker web of connections — university and business-school ties; membership of the boards not just of companies but also of charities and arts organisations; business deals and investment flows — all of which are marinated in a common set of attitudes and assumptions.

Globalisation exaggerates many of the meritocracy’s worst tendencies: the belief that you owe your success in life entirely to your own merits combined with distance from the little people. Older elites usually owed their wealth to physical things, particularly property, which, by their nature, bound them to particular places, particularly nation states. Old elites were trained in national universities that taught them that their first obligation was to their own countries. The new elites are trained in self-consciously global institutions, such as business schools that celebrate things like global supply chains and consultancies that force them to spend their twenties and thirties living on aeroplanes and in international hotels. They operate in a world that has no connection with the quotidian concerns of everyday people or, indeed, everyday decency: David Miliband, who abandoned British Labour politics for a lavishly paid job running the International Rescue Committee in New York City, once tweeted a photograph of a very scenic-looking Aspen proclaiming that it was a beautiful place to discuss refugees.

And so it is understandable that there is so much criticism of “meritocracy”, given its current debased form. But throwing the meritocratic baby out with the plutocratic bathwater would be both counter-productive and foolish: counter-productive because removing meritocratic mechanisms such as SAT tests will actually make it easier for rich people to buy their way into universities (a cynical view of what is going on in the United States is that the Anglo-Saxon elites are turning against meritocracy because they are being outcompeted by Asians); dangerous because meritocracy has been one of the keys to the West’s prosperity.

Suggested reading

Stop pretending to be working class

By Julie Bindel

The proper solution to the problem of the corruption of meritocracy is to purify it rather than abandon it. Expunge any remnants of the old world of favouritism (it is astonishing that America’s elite universities still preserve preferences for the children of legacies, who still make up about a quarter of Harvard’s student body). Give academy schools more freedom to select their pupils on the basis of academic promise (it is astonishing that Britain has secondary schools that specialise in the performing arts but not in mathematics). Force private schools to earn their charitable status by giving, say, half their places to poorer children who are selected on the basis of raw ability. Make much more use of standardised tests in selecting people for competitive jobs.

There is nothing wrong with meritocracy that more meritocracy cannot cure — but we need to make sure that we supply that “more” sooner rather than later, before the entire system comes crashing down under the weight of its growing contradictions.

Adrian Wooldridge’s new book, The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World, will be published on June 3^rd by Allen Lane.

An honest look at history suggests otherwise. Our Prime Minister was born in the shadow of Britain’s ‘golden age’ of social mobility (though as an Etonian from a wealthy family, he is no advert for it). Children born between the mid-1930s and the early 1950s — those I call the golden generation — were more likely to climb the social ladder than any before or since: 40% of them ended up in a higher social class than their parents. Less than 20% descended to a lower class.

This era was dominated by the “self-made man”, who became a paperback hero and a box office hit. Joe Lampton, the protagonist of John Braine’s bestselling novel Room at the Top (1958), was archetypal: born “on the fringes of poverty” and determined to “fight his way up into the bright world of money and influence”. Before the Second World War, hailing from a working-class family had no cultural cachet. By the time the Beatles achieved fame in the early 1960s, hauling yourself up by your bootstraps was such a praiseworthy feat that the lads from Liverpool were often presented as fresh from the slums.

Suggested reading

Yesterday, the Beatles and why talent isn't enough

By Dorian Lynskey

In reality, the self-made man is a myth. He owed his chances to the Labour government of 1945, which established a welfare state and guaranteed full employment. The state poured money into nationalised industries or private firms focused on peacetime reconstruction, research and development. Such unprecedented investment allowed jobs associated with the middle and upper rungs of the social ladder to multiply. Ambitious young men (and a few women) became senior clerks, engineers, technicians, middle-managers and teachers.

Meanwhile, conditions were favourable for those inclined to take a risk. Take Alan Sugar. It’s hard to find a feature on the businessman, born in 1947, that doesn’t describe him as a “self-made man”. The son of a market trader, Sugar was the first in his family to take O’Levels. After that he went into the expanding civil service, where he got a training in economics that came in handy when he started his own retail business in the early 1970s. Rising wages (thanks to strong trade unions) meant Sugar had receptive customers for his electrical goods. It was in this climate that he amassed considerable capital — enough to take advantage of the stock market in the 1980s and become a millionaire.

The most seductive part of the self-made man myth was that anyone could become one, with enough persistence. But even in the golden age of social mobility, there was far less room at the top than at the bottom. By 1961 more than 1% of the population were migrants. Regardless of their skills and qualifications, most did the dirty, low-paid work that post-war reconstruction relied upon. As hospital porters and school dinner ladies they were essential to the welfare state. As office cleaners and canteen staff they helped manufacturing firms to thrive. Their labour enabled some white Britons to climb into more lucrative and congenial work as nurses, teachers and managers. It certainly wasn’t the case that the most talented were enjoying life on the highest rung, nor that only feckless idlers languished on the lowest.

Men were more likely to climb the ladder than women. For most working-class women, a step up the ladder meant becoming a secretary or a nurse. These jobs were very fulfilling for some, but they didn’t offer the salaries and prestige accrued by managers or university lecturers (occupations that employed a lot of upwardly mobile men). Women’s most likely source of professional work was teaching, which employed a staggering 70% of female graduates. Many were disappointed by their limited options.

Suggested reading

The war on social mobility

By James Kirkup

The experience of Maureen Thomas, born in Barnsley in 1941, is typical. The daughter of a miner, she grew up knowing that the welfare state and full employment offered her a very different future from that of her sister, Gillian, who was just seven years older. Gillian had left school at 14 and got a job in a shop round the corner from their parents’ home. Maureen “wanted a life…not loads of money, just a bit of freedom”. She did well at school and dreamed of getting a degree and a career in the arts. But less than 5% of Maureen’s generation could get a place at university, and places for girls were particularly limited. So Maureen became a teacher — “and hated it”.

Maureen is one of many upwardly mobile members of the golden generation whose testimonies are recorded in the Mass Observation Archive, which was established in 1937 to find out about everyday life in Britain (and re-established at the University of Sussex in the 1980s.) The Archive issues quarterly ‘directives’ to hundreds of volunteer writers, and in 2016 I worked with it to try and understand how the golden generation felt about social mobility. What I learned from the Mass Observers — and from a wide range of other interviewees and unpublished autobiographies — forms the backbone of my book, Snakes and Ladders.

The Mass Observers reveal that men’s success often relied on women’s hard work. Wives set aside their own ambitions to support husbands’ careers. Some took paid work to fund their spouse’s training for a profession. Managers’ wives were expected to entertain the boss who could determine their husband’s next promotion. A self-made man might boast of his working-class roots, but he expected his wife to assume the accent and appearance of a bourgeois housewife.

The self-made man would have been as reluctant to credit his mother with his fortunes as his wife. But in the mid-1950s the sociologist Jean Floud revealed that a mother’s education and ambitions were key in facilitating her child’s social mobility. Paul Vincent Baker, born in 1948 in a Coventry council house, is living proof. “I don’t very often own up to my middle name being Vincent,” Paul said, “but apparently at a very early stage she got this vision of me going to Oxford or Cambridge and becoming a barrister, and she thought that a double barrel name — Vincent-Baker — would sound quite nice.” Mrs Baker, Paul remembers, “was the driving force behind education all the time”. Like many mothers, she used her earnings — from her job as a part-time cashier in a works canteen — to buy her children books, and helped with their homework.

Paul Baker got to grammar school, but such golden opportunities were rationed. The Labour government of 1945 introduced free secondary education, but only 20% of children attended grammar school: Floud revealed that a disproportionately small minority of working-class children passed the all-important eleven plus exam to gain admittance. The majority attended secondary modern schools, which were poorly resourced and offered no education beyond the minimum leaving age. In the early 1950s, Ann Davies’ mother moved the family to a London suburb “for the good schools”, but Ann failed the eleven-plus — to her own and her mother’s disappointment. After she left her secondary modern at 15 she got a clerical job; her younger sister got into grammar school and then university.

Not only were children from wealthier families more likely to pass the eleven-plus, but they also had the resources to escape the consequences of failure. Roy Todd was the son of a Northumbrian farmer. He didn’t win a grammar school place, but his family could “afford to send me to a modest boarding school”. This “allowed me to gain seven O levels” and become a teacher. His mobility was hardly “self-made”.

Suggested reading

What we meritocracy critics get wrong

By David Goodhart

Still, mid-century meritocrats assumed that only a minority of the population had the ability to do skilled or professional work, or to benefit from advanced education. This opinion was espoused by successive governments (the Tories took over from Labour in 1951) and by the senior civil servants who helped shape reform. And yet those members of the golden generation who didn’t take the traditional route up the social ladder proved them wrong. By the 1960s, more people were in white-collar or professional jobs than had attended grammar schools. In the 1970s, women, who had so often been denied an academic secondary schooling, flocked to universities and polytechnics as mature students.

Pamela Thornton was among them. She had been born in 1943 to a working-class Lancashire family. A “bookworm” from an early age, Pamela was “very jealous” of those girls who passed the eleven-plus. She attended a secondary modern and left at 15 to become a bakery assistant. By 1973 she was married to a council clerk, had a young daughter starting nursery school and “was ready for a new challenge”. Her local further education college invited her to teach a baking class and she “loved it”. By the end of the decade, Pamela was teaching a number of evening classes; in 1981, her newfound confidence led her to answer a plea for help in establishing a library at her daughter’s new comprehensive school. With the school’s support, Pamela trained as a library assistant and took up a permanent job with the council-funded schools library service. State-funded education laid the path for Pamela’s satisfying career.

Meanwhile, many members of the golden generation recognised that their success wasn’t based on their own exceptional merit. Encouraged to dream of a better future, some didn’t want to hoard wealth and opportunity, and instead made concerted, wide-ranging efforts to make life better for those on the lower rungs of the social ladder. The 1970s was a good time for equality. Activists started law centres so people didn’t have to rely on costly solicitors. Feminists campaigns gained momentum. Trade union membership rocketed: by 1979, more than 13 million workers had signed up, many of them in white-collar or professional jobs. By the end of the decade, the gulf between the rich and poor was narrower than it had been since the Second World War, and legislation had been passed to outlaw sex and race discrimination. Working-class people’s participation in further and higher education was rapidly growing.

Of course, some of the golden generation voted for a very different future, electing Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government of 1979. Thatcher promised to help people to help themselves, as unemployment rose in the late 1970s. She encouraged people to start their own businesses, buy their own homes, and go “into industry, into commerce, because that’s where the money is made”. But by looking behind the social mobility statistics, we can learn a lot from the golden generation about how to handle the pandemic and its aftermath.

History shows that, given the chance, most people are capable of contributing a great deal to society. Building back better means enabling them to do so. Education should emphasise creativity and co-operation rather than competition or conformity. Instead of bailing out bankers and millionaires, we should provide a safety net that gives everyone a secure foundation on which to build. And Government can create more room at the top. There is no objective reason why care work should not be a profession, why teachers and nurses should not be paid more for their valuable work, and why we can’t have a strong welfare state. Investing in people encourages the hard work of innovation, and generates more opportunities for future generations. ‘Success’ does not have to mean accruing enormous personal wealth. It certainly didn’t for most of the golden generation.

This year is the 75th anniversary of the 1944 Education Act. Among other things, Rab Butler’s landmark legislation established universal access to secondary education. In the post-war years, the state system was made up of two unequal parts – the selective grammar schools for children who took and passed the 11 plus exam; and secondary moderns for the majority who didn’t. 1965 marked the start of a new phase – the introduction of comprehensives, which supposedly abolished the great divide.

Of course, that’s to massively over-simplify what really happened. Nothing in the world of UK education is straightforward. After all, this is a country where ‘public schools’ are in fact private. As for comprehensives, their introduction wasn’t comprehensive. There’s always been a degree of devolution in the state system, which is why the grammar schools survived in some parts of the country.

Suggested reading

Boarding school put me in my place

By Justin Webb

The biggest pocket of resistance was, and still is, the county of Kent – which is where I grew up. My secondary school was Tunbridge Wells Grammar School for Boys, which sounds posh, but wasn’t. In fact, it’s real name (i.e. the one that most people used most of the time) was the unposh-sounding ‘Tech’.

That’s because it didn’t start off as a grammar, but a ‘secondary technical’ or ‘technical high’ school – an all-but-forgotten experiment that exposes one of the great failures of British education policy.

*

The old bipartite system of grammars and secondary moderns was originally meant to be a tripartite system.

The grammars, modelled on the public (i.e. private) schools, were there to supply recruits to a broadened-out ruling class, which in the 20th century had become more meritocratic than aristocratic. The secondary moderns were all about schooling the workers, white collar as well as blue – and, ideally, both literate and numerate. To this updated version of the class system was added a third element, one that didn’t really fit in with the old categories of rulers and ruled.

Winston Churchill once said that scientists should be “on tap, but not on top”. He was certainly right that the country needed a lot of them – plus engineers and technologists too. Both commerce and industry would grind to a halt without the advanced application of the arts and sciences, so an army of highly skilled workers was required. But where would this new technical class come from?

Suggested reading

What Eton taught me about power

By Sam Leith

The grammars and the public (private) schools, with their traditional focus on the classics, were not seen as best suited to the purpose. It being the 20th century, scientific and technical subjects weren’t excluded from the curriculum, but their teaching was more a matter of abstract knowledge than applicable know-how. There was also a lingering hint of British intellectual snobbery – a sense that the kind of technical education demanded by the modern world was nevertheless unbefitting of gentlefolk.

Hence the logic of the technical schools – a place for bright kids who wouldn’t mind getting their hands dirty. The tripartite system of post-war secondary education was thus a class hierarchy – with the technical high schools making up the middle layer.

*

Well, that was the theory; in practice, the middle layer got squeezed out. Implementation of the 1944 Act was left to local authorities, and provision tended to polarise between the grammars and the secondary moderns. Even before the advent of the comprehensives, the technical schools never accounted for more than 3% of the secondary school population.

Once again, Kent was an outlier. The county made a serious attempt to make the tripartite system work, setting up all three types of school. This is how my school came into being – established in 1956 as Tunbridge Wells Technical High School for Boys (or ‘Tech’ for short). However, by the time I got there, in the early 80s, it had become a grammar in all but name. The subsequent name change was a mere formality.

Suggested reading

Do leaders bluff their way to the top?

By Peter Franklin

It was also symbolic of the erosion of class distinctions – especially those between the traditional and technical professions. The British have long had a tendency to associate the word ‘engineer’ with greasy overalls, but in the post-war years the penny began to drop – we would need more than Oxbridge-educated classicists to prosper in the modern world. With the UK losing ground to the resurgent German, Japanese and French economies, our leaders decided that we had to embrace the “white heat of technology“.

Of course, the way in which the establishment conferred esteem upon the relevant occupations was to drag more and more of them into the academic route of A levels followed by higher education. Thus instead of sending their alumni directly into employment or to technical colleges, the secondary technical schools were increasingly supplying the universities. Amid all that technological white heat, the distinction with the traditional grammars had evaporated.

*

In many ways, what I received at Tech was a conventional academic education. And yet the school’s origins set it apart from the older grammar schools. The architecture was post-war plate glass, not Victorian red brick. There was no Latin or Greek, but quite a lot of woodwork and metalwork. There was a school uniform, but no ‘houses’. Corporal punishment was still legal at the time, but seldom used – the theoretical possibility served as sufficient deterrent.

There were prefects, but without much power – and as younger boys we weren’t afraid of them. Bullying, if it happened at all, was almost always verbal, very rarely physical. If it did happen, the thing to do was fight back: the teachers would intervene, but not make a big thing about it. Overall there was about as much order as one could reasonably expect from 800 boys.

Looking back, I can see how Tech pulled off a balancing act – academic rigour without stuffiness, aspiration without pretension, discipline without terror.

Of course, it helped that we were in a prosperous part of the country – one that did well out of the Thatcher revolution. However, we weren’t, most of us, sons of privilege – at least not class privilege.

Suggested reading

Why middle England became middle class

By Peter Franklin

As boys tend to do, we’d ask each other what our dads did for a living, and, as far as I can remember, it was jobs like postman, fire fighter, land surveyor, customs officer, sub postmaster. There weren’t many lawyers, doctors or even teachers among our folks.

If we ended up going to university, we were usually the first in our family to do so. And yet there was no particular fuss made about that fact. Nor was there much fuss made about not going to university – a degree was just one among many options to be taken as appropriate (and, it must be said, without loading our young shoulders with student debt). We weren’t burdened with overly pushy parents or teachers either. On the other hand, there was no hostility to academic achievement among the pupils. You could be picked on for many reasons – but not for being a swot.

*

In recent years, the grammar schools of Kent have become a political football. Various Right wingers promise to ‘bring back’ grammar schools (to places that don’t have them), while various Left wingers promise to abolish them. For my part, I’ll always be grateful to a school that pushed me when I needed it, but without ever crushing me. The unstuffy grammar school that Tech had become suited me well.

Still, I regret the disappearance of the old technical high schools. Not because setting children on a fixed route aged 11 or 13 was ever the right way forward, but because the techs represented a serious, systematic attempt to cater for the needs of intelligent, but practically-minded, children.

While other countries, notably Germany and Switzerland, have created impressive systems of technical education, Britain lags behind. The academically-minded benefit from the UK’s world-beating universities, but many parts of our country are held back by some of the lowest skill levels in western Europe.

To quote the words that often appeared on my school reports, we “must try harder”.

Suggested reading

Brexit has exposed our education apartheid

By Matthew Goodwin

My secondary school didn’t so much serve its pupils, but rather humiliated, discouraged and neglected them. As far as most of the teachers there were concerned, it was more a holding pen for the dregs of society than a place of education and improvement. I was once invited back to open a new wing of the school – given that I have a public profile and media career.  I told the person on the other end of the phone to shove their invitation right into detention.

Branksome Comprehensive served the 1,200 children on the council estate where I lived in Darlington. Though ‘served’ is perhaps an overstatement. Finding themselves teaching in a sink school, the teachers there subjected my schoolfellows and I to humiliation and violence at worst, and prejudice and indifference at best. Essentially, we were set up to fail.

In 2007, I wrote an article about someone whom I had known at Branksome; he ended up homeless and later in prison for murdering his ex-girlfriend. It prompted me to look into what happened to some of the other kids who had been there with me. I discovered that a number of them were serving life sentences for serious crime. Others had experienced different kinds of hardship. A mere handful had gone on to further education.

I started in Branksome in 1973, aged 11. My older brother Paul had already been there for a year, and, being a bit of a naughty child, had earned a reputation as a ‘troublemaker’. He didn’t do anything terrible, he just refused to be shoved around by a group of teachers who could not care less about his past, present or future. He did tell me he was caned 18 times one day as the teachers were ‘testing out’ three new canes recently acquired. Often, they would run at the kids to ensure they could lash them harder.

I remember my first day there, feeling shy and self-conscious, sitting in the school assembly as the Head Teacher addressed us all. I wasn’t particularly listening to him waxing lyrical, until I heard my name. He was pointing at me, shouting, “There we have one pupil to look out for. Julie, stand up.” He then began to tell the entire school that I would very likely be disruptive, because my brother was. It was an appalling start.

I had been a well-behaved and studious child in my primary school, which was set back behind the estate. That school was not purpose-built to contain ‘feral children’ as Branksome was. When I started secondary school, I was good at all the basic subjects, and even top of my maths class. And then the rot set in.

Something like 98% of my fellow students were from fairly poor, working-class backgrounds; there were one or two middle-class kids who had somehow ended up there. I soon made friends with a spirited girl who had moved from Newcastle and couldn’t find a school place in the middle-class area where she lived. She joined mid-term, and we soon became close. The English teacher, who seemed to dislike me, took umbrage at the fact that a posh girl wanted to hang out with a rough lass. The pair of us soon became demoralised, acted up, and were regularly sent to be caned, on the back of the legs and on the palms of our hands.

My mother used to say that the best education system was the grammar school. She had grown up in a traditional working-class family, and, as an extremely bright child, had sat the entrance exam for the local grammar. She passed. But when it became clear how much her parents would have to pay for her uniform, her books, and the regular field trips, they told her she couldn’t go, so she was sent to the local sink school.

Suggested reading

How I overcame my class stigma

By Roger Scruton

When I would come home and tell my mum how horrible Branksome was, and how the teachers didn’t care about us, she would put it down to the fact that it wasn’t a grammar school – its standards just weren’t particularly high. But I gradually became aware that the teachers simply thought we were ignorant and useless; they believed we would never usefully contribute to society. They had a vision for us that did not involve sixth form college, let alone university. As far as they were concerned, we were headed for the factory or a cleaning job, and there was no point giving us anything other than the most basic education.

But grammar schools aren’t the answer that so many, including my mum, think they are. They would not solve the problem of bad comprehensives. On the contrary, they would, as the evidence shows, widen the gulf between the poorest, most disadvantaged children and those who are given a leg up into the grammar school system. What we need to do is to improve comprehensive schools – and find a way to stop thinking of them as dumpsters for society’s forgotten kids.

Suggested reading

My social mobility shame

By Darren 'Loki' McGarvey

Children denied access to a decent quality education are also being denied the opportunity to reach their potential. The chasm between middle and working-class kids in terms of social status, earning power, confidence and the ability to interact across different communities – and even to raise the next generation – is well established within the first 18 months of secondary school. A culture of low expectation for children translates into underachieving children.

I should know. I underachieved throughout my time at Branksome. I swiftly dropped to the bottom of the class in every subject except for English literature. I only persevered at that because my escapism was imagining myself as a writer; I can’t give any credit to the teacher, who once said to me, “You won’t want to read Shakespeare, you won’t understand the message.” I had as much chance of understanding the ‘message’ as anyone else. I was bright. But I was not from the ‘right sort of family’.

It was a vicious circle. The more the teachers put me down, the more I rebelled and refused to interact. I fell behind in all of my subjects, and on the first day of my final year, after a liberating six weeks of summer holiday, I turned up – only to turn abruptly on my heel and walk away from the school.

I returned only on the odd occasion, to sign the register so that my parents wouldn’t get a visit from a school inspector. I missed my mock exams and took no O-levels. No one thought to ask where I was. On the day I went to collect my National Insurance Card, the head teacher, who suddenly seemed to remember me, told me: “You will amount to nothing.”

Suggested reading

Brexit has exposed our education apartheid

By Matthew Goodwin

We all know that the quality of teaching makes the most difference to the progress of children from disadvantaged backgrounds. Often, the teachers simply have to show an interest in the student – and take five minutes to get to grips with what the barriers to their learning are.

Improving the chances of kids in schools like Branksome might not even require more funding. It may be down, in part, to recognising that our state school system is riddled with class prejudice.